CrochetPARADE: Crochet PAttern Renderer, Analyzer and DEbugger
Svetlin Tassev
×The platform has been tested with the latest Chrome, Brave and Firefox browsers.
Some Safari versions have issues loading it correctly.
×UPDATE3: The hosting server was moved, so if you have any issues with the website, you may want to try clearing your browser cache and reloading the website.
×UPDATE2: Added new stitches to standard crochet diagram export: bobbles, puffs, popcorns; fixed back post and front post stitch placement. See Swatch 1 demo as an example.
UPDATE1: CrochetPARADE can now export crochet charts with standard crochet symbols. Export to SVG and one of the 3 output SVG files will contain the standard crochet chart (you need to allow multiple downloads if asked). Note that this feature is work in progress. Check out the video introducing the feature:
▲▼
Enter crochet instructions
Getting Started
Write your crochet pattern instructions in the text field on the left. The instructions should be in the CrochetPARADE language.
For examples, click on the dropdown menu.
3D view will be displayed here once the calculation button is pressed. Calculation can take a long time. The computational times in the example names are approximate and are for my laptop. Scale them for your device.
After the model is displayed in this canvas, click on it, and then you can press 'c' to see the yarn colors, or 'esc' to reset the view. Pressing 'ctrl+a' or 'a' will hide/display stitches incrementally. Pressing 'r' will automatically rotate the view.
See the help for more keyboard shortcuts.
×
About
CrochetPARADE (Crochet PAttern Renderer, Analyzer, and DEbugger) is a
platform that allows users to create, visualize, and analyze both 2D and 3D crochet patterns.
OVERVIEW
CrochetPARADE uses a custom language grammar that allows users to define stitches and stitch patterns.
The CrochetPARADE
grammar aims
to ensure accuracy and precision in the crochet pattern instructions, avoiding the ambiguities
encountered with instructions
in plain English. The code parses and checks any user provided pattern for correctness and
then creates a virtual model of the project, which is then rendered in 3D.
After rendering a pattern, users can review ('debug') the final project's
shape and make adjustments. The platform identifies overly loose or tight
stitches, enabling users to replace them with more suitable ones before crocheting,
thus reducing the need for blocking.
CrochetPARADE's export feature allows users to export an automatically generated crochet chart of their project using standard crochet symbols. One can also export an SVG image that
shows stitch connections and identifies stitches by their type, row number, and position within a row.
The SVG pattern shows the same information as standard crochet diagrams and can be used as an alternative guide when crocheting.
Users can also export projects to 3D files that can be imported in
Blender for further manipulation and visualization.
CrochetPARADE includes interactive features such as the ability to rotate, zoom, and pan the 3D view, as well as
animating the pattern creation
process, which can help in visualizing how stitches attach to each other.
Additional features include highlighting and hiding selected stitches, and
changing yarn thickness and color.
Users can access stitch information by hovering over stitches in the 3D view.
CrochetPARADE performs all calculations locally on your device, ensuring
that no data is collected to a central server or
transmitted over the internet. As a side effect, the platform can be sluggish on old hardware.
Models of patterns involving (tens of) thousands of stitches can take minutes or more to calculate.
GOALS AND POSSIBLE APPLICATIONS
The main goal of CrochetPARADE is to facilitate crochet project design and execution.
Patterns created with CrochetPARADE can be easily shared,
ensuring they are free from ambiguities or typographic mistakes.
Creators can simply copy and paste the pattern text to share it,
and others can use the CrochetPARADE platform to render the shared text into a model of the pattern
exactly as intended by the pattern author.
CrochetPARADE can be used in education to teach crocheting but also programming skills, since the CrochetPARADE grammar
follows rules similar to those of real programming languages.
The virtual models created by CrochetPARADE can be imported in 3D modelling and CGI software. Picture an animated movie where characters
wear crochet hats and sweaters that match real-world crochet projects.
It is probably inevitable that the grammar along with the renderer can
allow AI to learn how to write
correct crochet instructions of complicated patterns (beyond simple amigurumi)
based on general project descriptions.
LICENSE AND COPYRIGHT
The website and all of its computational components are free and open source and are released under
the GPLv3 license. This ensures that the
platform will be free and open to all in perpetuity.
The showcase patterns are either in the public domain (as specified in the pattern description)
or are created by the author and are released in the public domain.
The user manual which includes
a description of the CrochetPARADE grammar is released under the
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.
The grammar itself cannot be copyrighted and, as any language, is in the public domain.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
CrochetPARADE uses the following libraries: SVG.js and
three.js.
AUTHOR
Svetlin Tassev (2023)
×
Key bindings
General shortcuts.
ctrl+l: Toggle layouts.
Shortcuts in the text input area.
shift+Enter: Calculate positions of all stitches.
ctrl+Enter (experimental!): Keep positions of already placed stitches. Then calculate positions of newly added stitches since last calculation. Speeds up calculation, but results will be poorer than rerunning whole calculation by pressing on "Calculate..." button or pressing shift+Enter.
ctrl+r (experimental!): Same as the previous one, but recalculates only the positions calculated last time the calculation was run. So, it undoes the last calculation and restarts the calculation with the new stitches only. Speeds up code, but will lead to poorer results than rerunning the whole calculation again.
Shortcuts in 3D view. To activate, click on the 3D canvas first.
left click and drag: Rotate view.
scroll wheel: Zoom.
(right click and drag) or (shift and left click and drag): Pan view.
a: Show stitches one by one.
ctrl+a: Hide stitches one by one.
c: Show project colors. Gray is default if no colors are specified.
ctrl +/-: increase/decrease radii of spheres and cylinders. Affects exported GLTF file as well.
i: Toggle visibility of stitch information box.
shift+left click: Toggle persistence of stitch information box.
p: Write view to SVG file. For 2D projects, it shows a face-on view. For 3D projects, it shows an orthographic projection from the current view.
r: Rotate view automatically.
s: Highlight over/under-stretched stitches. Blue for stitches that are too loose, and red for stitches that are too stretched (by more than about 15%) relative to their baseline height. The rest are shown in gray.